Excerpts from the bombshell book have already appeared in several media outlets, prompting a fast, fiery and furious reaction from the White House.

President Donald Trump declared the book “phony,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders dismissed it as “complete fantasy” and a Trump attorney sought to halt publication of the “libelous” tome.

I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!

Born in New Jersey and educated at Columbia University, Wolff made his name as the media columnist for New York magazine.

He has since written for numerous other magazines including Vanity Fair, Newsweek and The Hollywood Reporter, twice winning National Magazine Awards for commentary.

In 2007, he launched a news aggregation website, Newser.com, which has enjoyed only modest success.

A well-known figure on New York’s glitzy social scene, Wolff is instantly recognizable because of his bald pate and black horn-rimmed glasses.

Taking readers behind-the-scenes

Before the Trump book, Wolff was perhaps best known for his 2008 no-holds-barred biography of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, “The Man Who Owns the News.”

Like “Fire and Fury,” the Murdoch book purported to take readers behind the scenes and show the inner workings of his organization.

For the Trump book, Wolff claimed he was granted extraordinary access and took up “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing.”

Writing in The Hollywood Reporter, Wolff said the book was the product of “more than 200 interviews with Trump and senior staff over a period of 18 months.”

The resulting portrait is of a “surreal” White House plagued by inexperience, factional fighting and a president who acted repeatedly “like a child.”

US President Donald Trump sits in the driver’s seat of a semitrailer as he welcomes truckers and CEOs to the White House in Washington, DC, to discuss healthcare, March 23, 2017. (AFP/Jim Watson)

“To say that no one was in charge, that there were no guiding principles, not even a working org chart, would again be an understatement,” he writes.

After a year in the White House, Trump’s staff — and even members of his family — “all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job,” he adds.

In seeking to halt publication of the book, Trump’s attorney claimed it makes “numerous false and/or baseless statements” about the president.

Besides the White House, a number of critics have emerged to dispute some of Wolff’s reporting — which, they note, has come into question in the past.

According to his critics, “Wolff has a penchant for stirring up an argument and pushing the facts as far as they’ll go, and sometimes further than they can tolerate,” The Washington Post said.

Wolff claims in the book, for example, that Trump purportedly did not know who John Boehner was after it was suggested that the former House speaker serve as his chief of staff.

Trump, in fact, has played golf with Boehner and has also tweeted about him.

Thomas Barrack, a close friend of Trump, denied a claim in the book that he had told another friend that the president is “not only crazy, he’s stupid.”

Wolff acknowledges in the introduction that he could not resolve discrepancies between some accounts in a White House riven by rivalries.

“Many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue,” Wolff writes of some accounts. “Those conflicts and that looseness with the truth, if not reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.” He says he “settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”

Other denials may be hard to disprove.

According to veteran Washington journalist Mike Allen of Axios.com, Wolff has tapes to back up quotes in the book — “dozens of hours of them.”

“That’s going to make it harder for officials to deny embarrassing or revealing quotes attributed to them,” Allen said.

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